2 answers

You can manually fly your ship anywhere by double left clicking in space in the direction you wish to travel... double left clicking on an object will have you approach/dock at that object.

Do Bare in mind that where you are moving is a 3D space... if you have the camera in a top down view for example, double clicking infront of the ship would do nothing in a 2D space but as it is 3D will cause the ship to fly down at an angle in relation to the distance of the cusor to the ship.

In terms of approach to an object or ship as mentioned the method above will cause high transversal, the faster your ship and the smaller your sig radius will amplify this effect.

High transversal is good because it puts the most strain on enemy guns trying to track your ship.

This approach will take longer, but will almost certainly mean less damage taken.

Worth of note, if you are flying a battleship or Battle cruiser this method becomes less useful because A) your not going very fast either, B) if you are going very fast you are almost certainly using a MWD so your signature is so big a dreadnaught could probably hit you C) if you have high transversal so do they, your big guns will have just as much trouble hitting them.

So in reality this is how a small ship would get in close to a big ship without dying, if the ships are evenly matched, the smaller the ship the more useful manual piloting is, big ships your are better off prioritising your mental capacity to managing all the mods and drones first and try and make sure you bring your broadside to bare and let the small ships prace around you.

If your natural speed is above about 250 m/s your speed helps you stay alive, a good manual pilot can tell that an enemy is on automatic orbit and be able to use this to real in the other pilot, or indeed escape as required, but this is really only practice, (and an appreciation/understanding of physics doesn't hurt) rather than game play or anything else

All you need to know to fly manually is how to double click in the direction you require and also the fact that clicking the blue speed ring will adjust your speed.

For a manual spiral approach, you would center the camera on the target, double-click half way between the target and the edge of the screen, and repeat (with an identical double-click position) until you are at the required range.

From the perspective of the target your ship would fly in a spiral pattern towards him and your transversal velocity would be much higher that if you just clicked approach or orbit.